Sir Richard Posnett

Sir Richard Posnett, who has died aged 89, spent more than 20 years in the
Uganda colonial service until the early 1960s, then was sent back 16 years
later to reopen the British High Commission in Kampala as Idi Amin's brutal
regime collapsed in chaos.

6:31PM BST 26 May 2009

In March 1979 Posnett was unenthusiastically contemplating retirement from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when his wife heard on the wireless that Yusuf Lule, his old colleague, had formed a Ugandan government-in-exile in Tanzania. At that moment Tanzanian troops had crossed into Uganda after repelling an attack by Idi Amin's army. With some doubts, Posnett mentioned to a colleague his knowledge of the former protectorate, where Britain had been unrepresented for three years, and the same day was ordered to set off.

Arriving initially in Kenya, Posnett found that the High Commission there knew little about the Tanzanian counter-attack into Uganda and shared little of the sense of urgency expressed by David Owen, the Foreign Secretary. Posnett managed to phone Lule, but was thwarted in his attempt to cross from Kenya into Uganda by Tanzanian troops at the border. Once back in Nairobi, he found a message from Owen, asking why he was not yet in Kampala, so he hired a former RAF pilot who agreed to fly him there, along with a lone German woman who wanted to find her husband.

Some 4,000 freed prisoners and Ugandan deserters were looting and burning when they reached Kampala, but Posnett's fluent Swahili enabled him to see the foreign minister who, enthusiastically accepting a bottle of whisky, promised to arrange a meeting with Lule.

When President Lule eventually arrived he greeted his old friend "Dick" with an enthusiastic embrace. Posnett then accompanied the German wife to a prison, where she found that her husband had been murdered, and he visited an Englishman in the bush whose sister had been killed but who still refused to leave his home. This incurred the ire of Yoweri Museveni, the defence minister and future president, who complained to London about Posnett leaving the capital without permission.

After being appointed temporary High Commissioner, Posnett asked permission to buy a shotgun; the request was refused, but he was sent two security men. When Godfrey Binaisa succeeded Lule as president, he embraced Posnett's wife as soon as the formal presentation of letters of accreditation was completed. Such informality was not in the FCO tradition. After reading the High Commissioner's report one official commented: "How is it that the presidency of Uganda seems to be reserved for Posnett's personal friends?"

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The son of a Methodist missionary, Richard Neil Posnett was born in India on July 19 1919. He went to Kingswood School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he formed a ballet society, won a 120-yard hurdles race against Oxford and read Maths before switching to Law. Called up by the RAF in 1940, he was enjoying flying Tiger Moths when he was asked to join the colonial service, to which he had earlier applied.

On arriving in Uganda's Arua region, west of the Nile, his duties included making regular safaris to supervise a sleeping-sickness programme, inspecting the famine reserves, attending village meetings and shooting any dangerous large beasts. Administration of Pax Britannica through two jurisdictions and many languages was a problem: adultery was a civil matter under English law but punishable by imprisonment by tribal courts. At 25 Posnett passed his first death sentence, which was later commuted by the Governor, but was uneasy when his recommendation of commutation in another case was not accepted.

There were pleasant diversions. He was in the first climbing party to conquer Mount Runwenzori, and he enjoyed organising Uganda's athletes to compete for the first time in the Commonwealth Games and at the Olympics.

Posnett foresaw trouble with the Colonial Office's plans to create an economically viable unitary state, which cut across the rights of the local ruler, the Kabaka. None the less he successfully organised the country's independence celebrations in 1962 and worked closely with the Prime Minister Milton Obote for a year, then left Uganda with "a hollow, homeless feeling" to join the FCO in London.

For a colonial officer whose primary loyalty had been to the people where he served, the priorities and tighter working practices in Whitehall proved uncomfortable. He was happier in New York working on the United Nations' fourth committee, dealing with colonialism, where critical descriptions of British rule differed strongly from his own experience.

In 1969 Posnett became a commissioner on Anguilla, where a British "invasion" was launched after the island announced it was leaving its union with St Kitts, 60 miles away. He made friends with the supposed instigator of Anguilla's "revolution", Ronald Webster, by challenging him to a cricket match. Posnett's team, made up of locals, paratroopers and British bobbies, lost by two runs, but he scored a six, which he said led to his being greeted everywhere: "You de man hit de sixer". After persuading the FCO that Anguilla could survive economically on its own, he returned for another uneasy two years in London, then was appointed governor of British Honduras.

Its premier, George Price, kept a formal distance, always referring to Posnett always as His Excellency. Price obtained a change of the country's name to Belize and a new capital, Belmopan, where the new governor's house was likened to a "prefab in Dagenham". But the desire for independence was restrained by the threat of invasion from neighbouring Guatemala, which claimed much of Belize's territory, coupled with Britain's determination to withdraw its garrison as soon as independence was granted.

On a family holiday in Guatemala in the early 1970s, Posnett spotted troops moving to the border with Belize and sent a signal alerting London. Two days later he found a squadron of RAF Harriers hovering low over his residence. This intervention prevented outright conflict and led to the dispute between Belize and Guatemala being taken to the UN, where a ruling confirmed Belize's territorial integrity. Price was then able to move forward to independence while young Belizians inquired about careers in the RAF.

Posnett turned down the post of consul general in South Africa because of his disdain for apartheid, and ended his career in charge of Britain's dependant territories. Shortly after retiring, however, he was offered the governorship of Bermuda. He enjoyed entertaining President Ford, Mrs Thatcher and the King of Saudi Arabia. He also introduced Binaisa, by then Uganda's former president, to local black leaders.

But Posnett's reputation as an enthusiastic decoloniser did not go down well with everybody. A complaint by a Bermudian cabinet minister was made to the FCO about the expenses Posnett claimed for phone bills, airline tickets and entertaining private guests. The breakdown in relations with local officials proved irreparable. Posnett, who felt the matter had been exaggerated, submitted his resignation, though he was later exonerated by the FCO.

On returning home he found enjoyable work travelling round Britain as an efficient independent planning inspector.

Dick Posnett, who was appointed OBE in 1963, CMG in 1976 and KBE in 1980, died on May 11. He married first Elisabeth Stiebel, a Swiss with whom he had two sons and one daughter; then, following a divorce, Shirley Hudson, an airline stewardess whom he met in Kampala and who also bore him two sons and a daughter. After her death he married Eva Inkson, a South African.